Elegiac, confounding, beautiful, and occasionally, bracingly strange: all of the things that I love about Krasznahorkai's work delivered in a short, taut package, a perfect starting point for someone wanting to dip their toes in the waters of his oeuvre – though if you want to dive off the deep end, start with SATANTANGO, his debut.
There is an addictive and hypnotic quality to all of Krasznahorkai's work and this collection throws his gift for long, rambly sentences (ahem) into widescreen – sometimes for the best, sometimes not. Fortunately, the former outweighs the latter: particularly fond of how he switches characters and points of view and time and place within a single sentence (sometimes of 22 pages or more, but hey) and makes it work. As a former musician myself, I dig Krasznahorkai's approach to writing, but I do have something of a gripe with his use of commas when they don't make rhythmic sense (to me, a comma is a brief rest, an eighth or sixteenth): in his usage in some - not all- cases here, they feel instead like quarter or half rests, stand-ins for a period for lack of any other way to prolong the trip (in all senses of the word) through his sentence-world.
Favorite tale is the title story, by far, though the hallucinatory The Bankers, is a close second and, while I can't say that I would recommend Krasznahorkai to everyone, if you're looking for something different and outside your normal wheelhouse, pick up this collection and if it speaks to you, go for his best novel, SATANTANGO; my complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.
Current reads; my complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.
